FACEBOOK FAIL: Message from police about son's death goes to mother's other inbox

We all know that Facebook’s “Other” inbox is just a bit stupid. It allows random people to get in touch with you, but then when they do it doesn’t alert you, it just files the messages away and more often than not they go unnoticed for a LONG time. It would be much more beneficial for users to never be able to contact strangers or to just have an occasional alert system whenever they do. Anyway, we’re not here to tell the Facebook team what to do, because it’s really down to the stupid users to mess everything up anyway.

The biggest Facebook communication fail we’ve come across in a long time hails from the US this week, where Clayton County police in Georgia used Facebook to tell a mother about her son’s death. Don’t worry, they didn’t write it on her wall or anything, but they sent a note from a secret undercover account, which meant it went straight into that darned Other inbox and stayed there for weeks while the family were searching for their son.

Due to the fact it was sent from some weird, dodgy-looking account, even when the message was read the family weren’t so sure it was legitimate.

According to Digital Trends, Clayton County police issued a statement, which read:

“Society has accepted social media as a major form of communication. We make every possible attempt to apply best practices when handling these sensitive matters. We will continue the traditional methods of personal face to face contact as we integrate this new tool of social media.”

In other words, we messed up royally and won’t try and use the interwebz again in future.